Superficial gestures not helping to improve people’s lives

THE EDITOR: On Friday May 16, I was visiting the school on the compound of one of the government-run children’s homes. I was in the Principal’s office upstairs, talking to the Principal and a teacher, when I shifted my stance slightly and my shoe heel went right through a rotten floorboard. As I tugged with both hands to haul it back out, while the teacher looked around for a patch of new floorboards where I could stand more safely, I thought to myself, Total Quality nation? Total Bloody Nonsense!!!

I have no faith at all in Vision 2020, unless part of its plan is a plan to remove the political leaders in both government and opposition and replace them with people who can think past the next opinion pool. The greatest obstacle for us in achieving total quality, anything is the fact that those governing us have not the slightest idea of what is priority or what is even real. Take a look at the facts: increasing crime among youth, increasing violence, deterioration of schools, collapse of the health system, unequal rights for the disabled, cancer patients holding barbecues to pay for medication and injections, burning of the hills every dry season, communities which have never had paved roads, reliable water supply, electricity or telephone service.

Take a look at the response: CEPEP (absolutely, certainly, definitely not the same as DEWD, sorry, LIDP, sorry, BURP, sorry URP), one hundred Cuban doctors, buying buildings downtown, moving Parliament, the University of Trinidad in Wallerfield. Do you see any connection to what we actually need? I don’t. I don’t see improved and expanded social services, rehabilitation centres specifically for young people, a complete rethinking of the education system based on the most recent research and best practice in education, professional mental health services made available to all communities, community development, improvement of the infrastructure (as opposed to pouring pitch on the roads every election), proper restructuring and reorganisation of the health system (and I do not mean RHAs) adequately funded and staffed children’s homes with all the required special needs resources at their disposal. In other words, all I see are grand superficial gestures, but I don’t see services for people or measures taken to improve the standard of people’s daily lives.

It is incredible to me that successive governments have complacently presided over the continued decline of so many or our essential services without ever thinking that something should be done to halt the slide. But I had to believe it as I hauled my shoe out of that splintered floor and thanked God that it was me and not a child. Until recently, I had despaired of ever making those in authority understand the issues. That is why I am so glad at what has happened with the National Library. With all the difficulties which young people have to face, those in power saw fit to give them a brand new library to solve their problems. Did they think it would solve the violence, the crime, the dysfunction in their homes? Well, the young people have certainly used it to draw attention to their reality. They have taken a shameless public relations exercise and converted it into a national stage on which they show us what they have to deal with — vandalism, violence, sexual abuse, learning problems, lack of discipline and structure in their environment. The lesson is clear. The only message which gets through to the powers that be is public mayhem — vandalism, crime, violence, delinquency. Unless we rock their little world of illusion, we do not exist. And that is the total quality of the governance we have brought upon our heads.

KAREN MOORE
Champs Fleurs